I encountered a discrepancy whilst training an electronic engineer in report writing which I found quite interesting.

He was trying to say that the failure rate of A was three times the failure rate of B.

He’d written:

“the failure rate of A is 3 times of B”
A 是 B 的三倍

I pointed out that this was incorrect syntax, and that he was translating directly from Chinese without regard for English grammar. And that it should in fact read:

The failure rate of A is 3 times that of B

The failure rate of A is 3 times B would also be acceptable.

I went on to say that he could even say:

The failure rate of A is 3 times more than B

This is where we found the problem. He said that in Chinese

A 比 B 多三倍

This means that A is in fact 4 times B because they add the sum of 3 times B to the original amount of B and therefore A is in fact Bx4.
I understood where he was coming from, however I actually was not sure whether this was also true for the English sentence that we drew the translation from. My gut feeling was that this does not stand in English, however it has been a long time since I forsook mathematics in the pursuit of the humanities.

I have since been told by another 2 engineers from another company that in Chinese ‘A is 3 times MORE than B’ will also cause A to be 4 (if B=1), and that their (Chinese) English teacher said the same also is true in English.